Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

by Meghan Daum

Here’s where I tell you that I love children, and where you look at me skeptically. But I do. I love them for their wild experiments with language; for their inability to feign interest in things that do not truly grip them; for their seriousness and total immersion in play.

I’ve learned from the work of the primatologist Sarah Hrdy that aunts exist in nature. Of course they are everywhere, biologically speaking, but some (marmosets and langurs, I’m looking at you) truly behave as the aunt I want to be, the aunt I have already become, and this is called allomothering. They will feed, groom, hold, and carry a child when they have had none of their own. So there is a word for what this is that I’m doing, I and all my sisters of the genetic dead end. Whatever I’ve learned in this life will not stop with me; I’ll teach it to Elsa.

Women are still angry about feeling duped and undervalued, but instead of ignoring their kids and downing cocktails all day, as in Friedan’s time, now we have the angry overdrive child-rearing style: motherhood as a competitive sport.

What McCray left unsaid, but what I suspect she was also getting at, is that it often takes a long time for women to “get into” taking care of themselves, and that her need for autonomy was as much about basking in her hard-won self-actualization as it was a reaction to the exhaustion that comes with tending to a child’s every need.

The feminism of a few decades ago was far less full of booby traps for the woman who wanted to claim it as a stance than it is in today’s superspecialized jargon-laden academicized version.

It seems unreasonable, not to mention sexist, to suggest that because all women have the biological capacity to have children, they all should; and that those who don’t are either in denial or psychologically damaged. My score on the LSAT indicates that I have the mental capacity to be a lawyer, but I have not gotten one single letter from a stranger or anyone else telling me that I would make a really great lawyer, that the fact that I am not a lawyer must be related to some deep-seated childhood trauma, that if I would only straighten up and become a lawyer, I could pay off some unspecified debt to the world.

I always used to say, when pressed about children, that I figured some kid would show up someday who needed something from me and I would be ready. Not only is that exactly what happened; it turned out I needed something she had to give, too. You might be tempted to say that with the arrival of Kaeleigh, I got to have my cake and subsequently eat it. You might even be tempted to say that now I have it all. But having it all is a slogan for ad execs and life coaches. I’ll settle for having freedom of choice.

you can most definitely have enough without having everything.

The knife was a prop, but I used it convincingly. I had dramatic tendencies. Like a lot of adolescents, I didn’t actually want to die. I wanted to be missed.